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Category Archives: Speeches

[Note: This year's State of the Union will be delivered on Tuesday, Jan. 12 at 9 p.m.]

Often, secondary English and Social Studies teachers use older texts to teach the standards of our subject areas. This is a good thing; however, in doing so, we are constantly asking our students to look back to the past, when we should also be asking them to think, discuss, and analyze their present and future.

One way to bring our classrooms into the present and to bolster the relevancy of our curriculum is to create lesson plans around texts being created now. One such opportunity arrives every year in the form of the President’s State of the Union Address. No matter whether our current president is a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, he or she must give this address, which makes it a great teaching text – we can count on it every year, yet every year it’s something new.

Below are four steps for using the President’s SOTU as a text for rhetorical analysis in your classes.

STEP ONE: Rationale and Objectives

Before students watch the speech, they need to understand why you are asking them to do so. The objectives must be clear so that students understand this is not a political or partisan exercise, but one in which they are analyzing language and its effects. Here are some sample objectives:

Students will understand the rhetorical situation of the President’s State of the Union Address.

Students will analyze how the President’s use of figurative language relates to the rhetorical situation.

Students will analyze how the President’s use of persuasive appeals works to achieve his purposes.

Students will analyze how the specific word choice (diction) relates to the rhetorical situation.

STEP TWO:Understanding the Rhetorical Situation

The rhetorical situation is the phrase used to describe the set of circumstance in which a text is created; in this case, the circumstances in which the State of the Union is being given. In order to write an effective speech, a speaker must have a clear understanding of the following elements:

Method of delivery: How will the speech be transmitted to other people?

Audience: Who is the speaker addressing?

Purpose: What are goals/objectives of the speech?

Speaker: Who is giving the speech?

Context: Under what specific historical circumstances the speech being given?

Prompt: What is the immediate prompt for this speech?

Subject: What is this speech about?

That’s a lot of moving parts, especially considering the fact that there are multiple answers for nearly all of those questions. You can discuss each one with your students or choose the one in which you would like them to focus their analysis. I use the acronym MAPS CPS to help students remember they are “locating” the elements of the rhetorical situation.

STEP THREE: Live Engagement

Ideally, we want students to be active viewers of the speech, just as we want them to be active readers. How to achieve this objective? Well, you’ve got two options: low-tech and high-tech.

Low-tech: As they watch the speech, students should take notes on specific phrases, words, or moments that strike them as important. Since the text of the speech is not released in advance, students can’t annotate while they watch, so this is the next best thing. Additionally, students can write down questions they have regarding the rhetoric of the speech. (You may also encourage them to write down questions regarding the formalities of the event, especially if it’s their first time watching a SOTU.)

High-tech: If your students are able to tweet, create a class hashtag that you will all use while tweeting during the Address. Instruct your students to tweet specific phrases, words, or moments that strike them as important. Since we want them to stay focused on the speech, you can instruct students not to worry about engaging in an actual discussion. After the conclusion of the speech, students should scroll back in the feed and indicate their favorite tweets by clicking the (ridiculous) heart icon. Tell them ahead of time that the most “loved” (seriously, when will Twitter bring back the star?) tweets will be the ones you all discuss in class, so it’s important that they follow through on that last step. You can also encourage students to tweet questions during or after the speech, re-emphasizing the focus on rhetoric and format, not politics and policy.

STEP FOUR: Follow-up Discussion

Using the students’ notes and/or tweets as a jumping point, you are now ready to engage in a student-driven class discussion.

One way to do this is by providing students with photocopies of the actual speech text, which should be released following the conclusion of the speech. Having a hard copy of the speech will allow students to make notes during your discussion and remind them of the context for specific words and phrases. (If you can’t get hard copies that quickly, you may want to delay an in-depth discussion by a day so that students can annotate on the hard copies during the discussion.)

Another way of building upon the students’ observations is to create a Google document of the speech’s text that all your students can access. Again, the objectives should be clear. You may want students want to discuss diction, and so you ask them to highlight specific words and write a brief analysis of the connotation and effect of that word choice. Or you may want them to highlight examples of when the word choice reflects the audience to whom the President is addressing. Or maybe you want students to comment on the organization of the speech as it relates to the achieving the President’s purpose(s).

STEP FIVE: High-five yourself on an engaging, thought-provoking, analytical lesson that also makes your students active participants in the democratic rituals of our great country.

The President’s State of the Union address is tonight, which presents a great opportunity to engage students in the on-goings and up-comings of national policy with a text that lends itself perfectly to the analysis of tone, diction, persuasive appeals, and other rhetorical devices.

If you can, engage students in the live event. Use Twitter, Blackboard, or other ways of connecting to your students to create a group record of the rhetorical devices students notice in the speech. The White House has created a specific page of their website for the State of the Union, on which people can watch a special enhanced version “featuring live data, graphics, and charts that explain the issues and policies he’ll be discussing in the speech.” Partisanship be damned – that’s just cool.

If you don’t have a means of connecting tonight or want to do more, you can analyze the speech tomorrow or later in the week by printing out the text and giving each student a copy to read, annotate, and then use for your lesson.

Here’s a specific, simple lesson: give students copies of the speech to read and annotate (either in class or at home); in the meantime, you divide the speech into even sections. Then, get students into groups of 3-4 and let them choose the section they would like to analyze specifically for tone. I’ve created a graphic organizer that you can give to each group on which they can record their observations: TeacherSoup Analyzing Tone in Speeches. After the groups are finished, they can present their findings by explaining their organizer on the document camera or overhead projector. Hold the rest of the class accountable by asking them to add the annotations to their own copies of the speech and collecting the speeches for a quick classwork credit check.

Let’s get students thinking, reading, and engaging in the issues that will affect their adult lives. Enjoy!

Today was a day of firsts for me. It was the first time I drove my daughter to preschool. It was the first time my husband realized halfway there that preschool was cancelled. It was the first snow day for my daughter. It was the first time my daughter went sledding. And it was the first time I went sledding. (I consider it a personal accomplishment that I didn’t eat it in front of all the other kids. Like I did my first time skiing. I’m from Florida, you know.)

Today was a first for a lot of politicians too. Freshmen congresswomen and congressmen were sworn in today and took their place in American political history. I admit, I’m jealous. When I was in 5th grade, two high school guys visited my class and gave a presentation about careers. As an adult, I realize this activity had “extra credit” written all over it, but at the time, I was impressed. When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I excitedly and sincerely answered, “President of the United States.” They smiled. Again, as an adult, I realize now their smiles were based on their knowledge of the far-fetched nature of my aspiration. As a 10 year old, I felt belittled. And pissed. I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time – those lessons would be learned the following year on the bus - but I’m pretty sure my expression read, “Watch me, a-holes.”

Turns out, they were probably right. I say probably, because you never know! If people live to be 100 now-a-days, I may still have a shot. While awaiting my own Town Hall meetings, I’ve turned my own political interests outward and tried to emphasize the importance of intellectual citizenship in my teaching. I want my students to think, research, analyze, listen, and engage in their government. I want them to be aware of the manipulations, pratfalls, fallacies, and steaming piles of horse-manure that dot the great American political arena, so they can find people and ideas to genuinely support.

One of my favorite genres of texts to use with students is speeches. They’re often examples of powerful, poetic prose, and they serve to inform students of either the past or present. The chart I’ve created and included for you is just a place to start when considering how to use speeches in your classrooms. The activities are suitable for middle and high school students of any level and align with multiple Common Core State Standards. Some of my best teaching moments happened during these activities, so I hope they are equally meaningful to you and your students.